To the premiere of The Last Station, starring Helen Mirren, Michael Hoffmann's film of Jay Parini's novel about the extraordinary last year of Tolstoy's life. Actually, as we waited for the lights to go down in the Curzon Mayfair, I realised that there were at least three stories competing for attention here.

First, if ever there was a parable of the advantages of the novel over the film script, it must be Parini's 20-year struggle to get his book on to the big screen. Parini started his novel in 1986 and published it, after many drafts and some creative agony, in 1990, followed by a few reviews and the usual let-down.

Then the phone rings. It's Anthony Zorba the Greek Quinn. He wants to play Tolstoy and he wants Parini to write the script, with him. Amid the joy of a possible movie deal, Parini could not know that it was this last phrase ("with him") that would be the killer. Quinn's involvement made the project real, but his collaboration made the script impossible. Parini felt he was being asked to write "Tolstoy the Greek". The project began to languish.

Sadly, Quinn died, so Parini, an optimistic soul for whom the glass is always half full, set off for another spin on Hollywood's magic roundabout. Same producer; new director; new script; new stars: Meryl Streep and Anthony Hopkins.

So it makes perfect sense that, when all the pieces of the movie jigsaw were put together, Tolstoy would be played by Christopher Plummer and his wife, the Countess, by Helen Mirren, who is part Russian, with a supporting cast led by James McAvoy and Paul Giamatti.

Parini says he was "damn lucky" and he's right. But, like lucky people generally, he made his own good fortune. This is the second strand of the back-story to The Last Station. Apart from his remarkable persistence, Parini was the first to spot that the diaries kept by one and all in the Tolstoy household could become raw material for a novel.

Keep a diary, goes the saying, and it will keep you. Take several diaries from warring courtiers round a literary king, weave them into the tale of a legacy, and it might just be box office. Parini's novel cleverly animates six competing viewpoints during the final days of the greatest novelist who ever lived.

That's not just hyperbole. I'd happily fight a duel with anyone who disagrees. The author of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Resurrection and The Death of Ivan Ilyich is fiction's Shakespeare, an out-and-out, world-class genius. That's what Russians believe. In 1910, Tolstoy was the biggest literary celebrity on the planet. This devotion is the backdrop to the enthralling story of The Last Station.

From a literary point of view, what really animates the drama is that this great artist has, in old age, renounced his past, and the novels of his youth, and begun a quest for a purer, simpler life. That's the third strand of our story.

By the turn of the century, Tolstoy was living in his ancestral home, Yasnaya Polyana, surrounded by family, various hangers-on and the Russian media, which were camped in his driveway.

Preoccupied with the social issues that would come to a head in the revolution, Tolstoy wrestled with man's place in the universe and attempted to manage the conflicting demands of his art, his wife, his family and his fans.

As The Last Station movingly portrays, it was an unequal struggle. On one side, there was his creepy Tolstoyan disciple Vladimir Chertkov, who wanted his master to reject bourgeois values, bequeath his copyrights to the Russian people and live the life of a secular saint. On the other, there was his loving, long-suffering wife, Sofya Andreyevna, whose relationship with Tolstoy is archetypal of the long-term muse and partner.

Eventually, the tensions became intolerable. The old man took to the road in search of peace and solitude, but fell ill almost at once. In November 1910, he died in the railway station at Astapovo, surrounded by the world's press, still grappling with the biggest mystery of all – married love.

Where was Dionysus when we needed him?

Hard to imagine that we should come so soon to regret the morphing of Whitbread into Costa. This year's prize-giving at London's Quaglino's restaurant plumbed new depths: scant alcohol, no dinner and an egregious promotion of the brand. The one bright note of a low-key evening was the award of the prize to Christopher Reid (above) for A Scattering (Arete Books), his moving tribute to his late wife, Lucinda Gane, overdue recognition for one of our best poets. Chair of the judges Josephine Hart summarised the general view when she observed: "Austere, beautiful and moving – we all felt this is a book we would want everyone to read." Usually, when the muse of poetry is celebrated, Dionysus is on hand to sponsor appropriate libations. But Costa was too busy promoting itself (literally) with free cappuccinos. They'll have to do better next year or there will surely be a boycott.

Small but perfectly formed Cervantes

News that the Tijote project is going to twitterise Don Quixote has inspired several Cervantes tweets, some of them so terse that the Tijote project can possibly be declared redundant, viz.

1. Believing he cuts a dash, old bloke romps round his neighbourhood attacking windmills, loving ladies and being mean to a dim-witted friend

2. Deluded noble knight goes adventuring, taking chivalry to absurd lengths, tilting at windmills and founding modern western literature along the way

3. Lean old man disappears into fantasy world of chivalry, ends up travelling with a fat man trying to save damsels who don't want to be saved.

4. Bookaholic man has a knight-in shining-armour complex, spurring him to farcical quests with fat chum. Sanity is the enemy of a good time.